I’m a huge fan of the intersection of science, technology, and art—where the distinguishing traits of humanity come together to produce some of the most awe-inspiring creations in our known universe. A couple of years ago I discovered an inspiring piece of engineering and art which aims to visualize the complexity and elegance of the human brain and the beautifully choreographed ballet of information that continuously travels through its billions of neurons as you experience each moment of your life.
Created by neuroscientist and artist Greg Dunn, the piece, titled Self-Reflected, struck all the right chords for my tastes and interests. I hemmed and hawed about buying it for over a year before finally deciding that I would splurge for Christmas and use it as an excuse to undertake a bit of a hobby project for myself. You can find all the details you might care to know about Self-Reflected and how it was made here. The rest of this post is about my efforts to get the most out of it. If you’re not interested in the details, you can just watch the video of the final result above.
Etching
Self-Reflected is an artistic rendering of an oblique mid-sagittal slice of the human brain; here is an image showing the location and orientation of such a slice. The piece is physically realized as a micro-etched print, which means that a fixed light source pointed at it is reflected differentially at neighboring points very close together on the etching. This technique produces visually interesting effects even with a static light source, but is most evidently impressive when the light source is moved relative to the etching.
The movement of a light source from side to side produces an animated effect in the etching that brings the rendering to life in a surprising and visceral way, giving the appearance of electrical impulses traveling along the axons and dendrites of the neurons depicted in the etching. Varying the intensity, speed, and color of the light source produces an endless array of animations, some of which you can see in the video I recorded above.
Since the purchase of Self-Reflected includes only the etching itself, I needed to build a lighting rig to mount over it in order to realize its full potential. I’ve documented the steps I took and design choices I made when building the lighting rig and control unit here for anyone potentially interested in doing something similar.
Lighting and Power
In order to be able to enjoy the piece from a reasonable vantage point, I needed to animate a light source programmatically, rather than stand over the etching and wave a light back and forth manually (this would get tiring). I did some brief searching, asked a friend, and found that NeoPixels were a popular choice for artistic lighting projects. NeoPixels are individually addressable LED lights that can be controlled via digital micro-controllers like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Technically NeoPixels are AdaFruit’s brand of addressable RGB LEDs using the WS2812 drivers/protocol. They are shipped in various configurations, but most commonly as a linear strip, which is exactly what I needed.
I purchased a one meter strip of NeoPixel equivalents and started reading up on what I needed to program them. AdaFruit’s site was super helpful in figuring out what I needed and how to put everything together. They recommended powering the strip separately from the micro-controller used to control them, since the LEDs need a lot more power than the chip. I purchased a 5V 2A switching power supply to power the strip, a female DC power adapter to connect to the leads on the strip, and a 4700uF 10V capacitor to put across the terminals; the last component was recommended by AdaFruit to prevent any initial rush of current from damaging the pixels.
There are options for powering the NeoPixels via batteries, but since the rig was going to be mounted stationary over the etching I didn’t bother exploring them much. I could just leave the whole thing plugged in all the time and not worry about charging batteries, though the cables are admittedly a bit ugly.
With these parts assembled, I connected the power supply, adapter, and capacitor to the strip and plugged it in, lighting up the strip. So far so good. Now I needed to figure out how to control them.
Control
I wanted to be able to control the lighting rig from my phone, both to avoid needing to get up on a chair to push buttons on the controller and to be able to customize properties of the lights easily. I looked up some popular micro-controllers and settled on AdaFruit’s Feather Huzzah ESP8266Â which is sufficiently small and has a built-in WiFi module. Once I had the Feather, I connected it to my laptop over USB and followed AdaFruit’s guide to interacting with it using the Arduino IDE. Now I needed to connect the NeoPixel strip to the Feather.
I soldered connector wires from the ground and data leads on the strip to the appropriate pins on the Feather. At this point I was able to turn both the strip and the Feather on without anything catching on fire, and they seemed to work properly. The strip still only turned on with all pixels at full white though. To make any changes to their color and brightness I needed to actually send some data to them.
The NeoPixels Arduino library is open source and lets you program a set of NeoPixels from an Arduino through a simple interface. I loaded one of the samples in the library onto the Feather through the Arduino IDE to test the full setup and things seemed to work fine. Two things left: write a program to move the lights in a pattern that best fits the purpose of Self-Reflected, and find a way to customize a few properties of this program over WiFi so I don’t need to make code changes to adjust them.
For the latter step I settled on the Blynk IoT platform, which provides a user-friendly way to create widgets in a phone app that you can tie to “virtual pins” on your Arudino by writing functions that reference Blynk’s libraries to send/receive data to/from those “pins”. Blynk is a paid service, but free for a single-user, single-device project, which is all I needed. Here’s a shot of the set of widgets I chose for the lighting controls.
The widgets let me turn the whole strip and off, turn the light chase animation on and off, set the color and brightness of the lights, the speed of the chase animation, and the width of the little Gaussian bumps that produce the animation effect when they move across the strip.
The Arduino program that animates the lights and communicates with the Blynk app is fairly simple. Here’s a gist of the code, with my network details redacted.
With the control unit working and the code written, the last step was to mount the whole rig and fine tune the settings.
Mount
I needed to mount the light strip above the etching, facing down toward the ground to get the proper effect. This required a custom mount, which I built from scrap wood and a small hinge I got from Home Depot.
I wanted the whole mount to be easily detachable from the wall to make servicing and experimenting with the light strip easy. The base of the mount is a horizontal wooden bar, which I just hook onto a couple of screws in the wall using picture mounting brackets I screwed into the back of the bar. A cross bar comes out from the base bar to put distance between the wall and the light strip. The mounting bar for the light strip is a long (4 feet) thin piece of wood slightly wider than the light strip itself, and this bar is attached to the cross bar with a small metal hinge so that I could modify the angle between the strip and vertical somewhat after construction without needing to recut anything. I stained the whole mount structure with a dark wood stain to better match with the etching frame and my furniture.
I mounted the NeoPixel strip to the cross bar using a metal casing strip designed to hold the light strip flat in place. The casing comes with a translucent strip cover that slides over the casing to smooth out the light coming from the strip and make it seem more continuous, rather than a sequence of individual LEDs.
I wanted some kind of case to put the Feather and connecting wires in so that I didn’t have to attach them directly to the wood and have loose wires hanging off of it. I found this page on AdaFruit’s site providing modular CAD models of different types of cases for the Feather, which could be 3D printed. I downloaded the parts I wanted (the Feather case with mounting tabs and the topper with header holes) and had them 3D printed by 3D Hubs for a reasonable price.
In the end, because I’m a terrible electrical engineer and not much of a handyman, the case didn’t wind up providing much in the way of cleaning up the design of the mount, but it’s better than nothing. There are still wires sticking out un-aesthetically, but they’re not really visible from below when it’s mounted above the etching. Things aren’t perfectly straight either, but I’m calling diminishing returns on spending more time on it. Here are a couple of photos of the final (janky) version of the mount (yes there was duct tape involved).
End Result
After sneaking an hour or two here and there every couple of weeks since Christmas working all of these steps out, I finally finished the damned thing. Or at least I’ve put as much time into it as I care to. The video at the top of the post gives you a sense of the piece as it was meant to be viewed (I hope). Below is a photo of the final result mounted over the etching (yes I know it’s a little crooked; diminishing returns). I learned a few things working on this, but mostly I’m happy that I now have an animated brain in my bedroom.
Chris Vigorito 
